Unseen

Whoever the Dji

It took a quarter of an hour, but Esmeralda’s progress abruptly ceased, and I dragged Luis to a panting, trembling stop a few feet behind her. Her rattlesnake-patterned coils pulled themselves together in a tense pattern, bracing her for a strike, but the rattle remained silent.

Luis collapsed to one knee, and I heard a soft moan out of him, something he tried to muffle but couldn’t. The pain was intense; I felt it burning between us, and touched his damp shoulder to try to numb the screaming nerves. He shook me off. His long, dark hair was soaked with sweat and clung to his face in sharp, sticky points. “Is she here?” he whispered. I shook my head. I didn’t sense her, but there was something gathering on the aetheric around us, dark as a coming storm.

There was a flash of blue-white light to the east, and in its glow I saw Isabel standing back-to-back with Gillian. They were surrounded by what looked like half a dozen wolves—big, rangy ones, circling and charging in to nip at them. It wasn’t natural hunting behavior, although wolves could certainly hunt humans if they chose. I felt the pressure on the animals in the aetheric, heavy enough to make my head ache even at this distance. The wolves were letting out soft yips—not excitement, but pain.

They wanted to run, but couldn’t. Instead, one darted forward, lunging for Gillian, but the young Weather Warden was ready; a blast of air met it and slammed it backward, tumbling through the air to land splay-legged ten feet away. It trembled with the urge to flee, but inched forward again, dragged against its will.

“Es,” I said. Her human face turned toward me. “You handle the wolves. We’ll handle the real enemies.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded, and in a flash she was heading for where we’d seen Isabel and Gillian fighting for their lives. There was another flash of light—Isabel, throwing fire—and in its glow I saw that one of the wolves had grabbed Ibby by the front of her shirt and was dragging her like a cub across the ground as she fought. The fire sent it yelping away, and Ibby scrambled back to where Gillian was batting another wolf away. There was a tornado forming above them, and I felt the whipping, ferocious winds from where I stood. Gillian pla

But out in the dark, someone sliced into her careful construction, and the tornado wobbled, lost cohesion, and became an uncontrolled downburst that snapped off trees and slammed Gillian and Ibby to the ground.

The wolves closed in, but before they could sink their teeth into the girls, Esmeralda was there. She hit the wolf pack like a wrecking ball, slapping her coils into them, crushing some and throwing others at bone-breaking speed into trees. I turned away as she hissed and struck at the one closest to Isabel. I didn’t need to witness it to know that she would keep the girls safe ... at least from the wolves. Whether they would be safe from Esmeralda was a larger puzzle, but it had to be risked.

Luis nodded to me, and we moved toward the place from which the Weather Warden had struck to disrupt the tornado. On the aetheric, there was a black tangle, impossible to sort out—it could have been one, or twenty.

It proved to be three, and they were once again children. One Weather, one Fire, and one Earth. There was no sign of the Void represented here, which relieved me greatly. It was possible that Pearl had not been able to train enough of those kinds of soldiers yet, or that they were rare. I was glad enough not to face one.

The children were focused on Esmeralda, as I’d hoped, and Luis and I got within striking distance without being noticed. He took down the Earth child first, clapping a hand to the boy’s forehead from behind and dragging him off his feet; at the same moment I took the Fire Warden child, another boy. Mine went down more easily into an enforced, deep sleep; Luis’s fought, and I had to jump to his side and add my strength to his to overcome the boy, even taken by surprise as he was.

That left the Weather Warden, an older girl of about fourteen. She was legitimately old enough to come into her powers, but her fine control and raw strength were far from natural; she’d used the seconds of warning well, and as Luis and I tried to grab her, she pulled a massive amount of power from the air around her, drenching us with moisture and then ripping away energy to create ice. It wasn’t thick, but it was shocking, and it slowed us down long enough for her to scramble backward and launch her next attack, directly from the clouds overhead: lightning. I felt the buzzing whisper of power beneath my feet, of electrons turning and seeking alignment with those above. Even a full Dji

Flesh is an imperfect conductor. The delicate mechanisms of life are not suited to cha

What I did have was a co

No one had prepared me for the pain. I’d been Tasered recently, and that had been painful, but this was like having every nerve in my body stripped raw and screaming, and then shaved with razors. It seemed to go on forever, and I felt my heart struggling not to seize up, fibrillating in the current ...

... And then it was gone, and I dropped to the forest floor, unable to move. Alive, but trembling with agony. What I could see of my hand seemed intact, though the sleeve of my jacket breathed wisps of smoke.

Luis hadn’t stopped. He had launched himself in a purely physical attack, barreling into the girl and slamming her down into the leaf litter on the ground. She screamed out raw defiance and rolled him over, pushing her palms down on his chest.

I saw his eyes go wide, and he struggled to breathe.

No! She had taken away any kind of breathable air in his body. She could suffocate him this way—it was difficult for an Earth Warden to escape this particular sort of attack ... hard to hold on to focus and power while drowning in clear air.

She thought I was down, out of the fight.

I wasn’t.

I lunged forward, grabbed the girl’s long, braided hair in my metallic left hand, and yanked her backward. She shrieked and reached instinctively for her head, and I wrapped my arms around her to still her struggles. Luis rolled over, climbed to his feet, and put his hand on her forehead. She fought, but couldn’t ride the tide of darkness. It took her under.

I let her fall, and collapsed next to her, gasping. My nerves still didn’t seem free of the random, coursing energy; I felt oddly displaced, light-headed, numb. I shouldn’t have been able to survive that, I thought, but that, too, seemed distant, almost unimportant.

Esmeralda’s coils writhed into view, and she wrapped her body around the base of a tree. Isabel and Gillian were with her. I saw no sign of the wolves, living or dead; I hoped most of them had escaped with their lives, but Snake Girl looked suspiciously well fed.

“You’ve got them,” she said. She sounded surprised. “Not bad.”

“Glad you like it,” Luis grunted, and sat down—more of a controlled fall, really. “Damn, Ibby, what were you thinking?”

She came to him and gave him a hug, a long one. “I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t really sound sorry. “Es told us they were out here. I was afraid they’d hurt somebody else. I didn’t want them to get Sanjay and Elijah.”